How to Sex Guinea Fowl

How to sex guinea fowl can be mystifying to anyone who hasn’t spent a lot of time around guineas. But it’s not quite so mystifying once you learn the clues to watch for.

Vent Sexing

Keets (baby guinea fowl) of most varieties all look alike. In the buff and buff dundotte varieties, the females are somewhat darker than males. To a lesser extent the same is true of brown and chocolate varieties.

The only way to sex most keets, though, is by vent sexing, the same as you would a chick. Accuracy depends on your skill in examining minor differences in the tiny cloaca just inside a keet’s vent. That requires keen observation and a great deal of training, and is best learned from an experienced chick sexer. Improperly done, vent sexing can result in injury or death to the keet.

Mature guineas also can be vent sexed, although they typically don’t take kindly to be caught and handled. And by the way, contrary to what you might see on other websites, male guineas do not have a penis. In this regard, guinea cocks are like roosters.

Sexing by Sound

Listening to keets won’t tell you much about their gender. They all make musical happy peeps, loud unhappy peeps (when they’re hungry or cold), and a cherrr sound (which means “be still, I sense danger”).

As they grow, both cocks and hens vocalize alarm by repeating a loud chit-chit-chit sound. When they reach about six weeks of age, the hens start making a repeated two-syllable call that sounds like “good LUCK” or “come BACK.” Males never make this sound. The hens’ call is therefore the most obvious clue in learning now to sex guinea fowl.

This call is often described as sounding like the word “buckwheat,” which is nonsense. The word buckwheat is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable — BUCKwheat. Female guineas put the accent on the second syllable. Who says buckWHEAT?

My neighbor describes the sound as potteracking. I used to wonder why, since potter-rack has three syllables. But I’ve since occasionally had a hen that speaks in three syllables, with emphasis on the last syllable: pot-ter-RACK or “don’t come BACK.”

Interesting that the females stop making their unique call while they’re nesting. Hens on a nest — guinea hens cooperatively hatch their eggs — make a different kind of nesting sound. But they still join the males in loud chatter.

Sexing by Appearance

At about the same time the hen’s start sounding their two-syllable call, the males’ heads take on a subtle blockier appearance compared to the females’ more refined heads. The triangular helmet of the male becomes somewhat larger and more upright, while the female has a smaller helmet that angles slightly more toward the back. However, as they age their helmets can look pretty much alike.

The male guinea’s wattles are generally larger and more curved. A young female guinea has small, flat wattles. Again, though, the older they get, the more similar their wattles become.

The males have a small red protrusion above the nostrils at the base of the upper beak. The female’s upper beak is more smooth.

Male guineas are generally larger than females of the same age. Cocks outweigh hens by a half pound or more.

Males generally stand and walk more vertically and alert. By comparison, the female’s more horizontal stance looks like she’s searching the ground for things to eat. Which she probably is.

Sexing by Ears — Wait! What?

A fellow once told me his grandpa sexed guineas by looking at their ears. I was skeptical, so I sent a query to the owner of a major guinea farm, but he never answered. He probably thought I was some kind of kook.

Well, I started paying attention to guinea ears. It seems like most hens have a nice, neat, round ear opening. By contrast, the ear openings of most males are somewhat more irregular in shape.

But I wouldn’t stake my life on sexing guineas by their ears. It’s just one more thing to observe when learning how to sex guinea fowl.